OH DAMN I CALL BULLSHIT-- the director said they were the first "indie" movie in cannes but SHADOWS won a prize there.

ah, self-hyping east villagers from the 70s! incorrigible...

It seems like there's a lot of conflicting information about Shadows being at Cannes. Some say it won the critics award there but to my knowledge that was at Venice. I don't think it actually showed at Cannes. I just checked the Cannes website and it isn't mentioned anywhere. I may well be wrong though.

Anyway, just watched

The Border

Strange film. The cast, theme, director, pretty much everything about this film should've made it an absolute winner. It's not bad just a bit underwhelming, in a way that no film set on the US-Mexican border in the late 70s and starring Warren Oates, Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel has any right to be.

It seems like there's a lot of conflicting information about Shadows being at Cannes. Some say it won the critics award there but to my knowledge that was at Venice. I don't think it actually showed at Cannes. I just checked the Cannes website and it isn't mentioned anywhere. I may well be wrong though.

there is no "critics award" at cannes! it's the grand prix or the jury prize or some such shit but no "critics".

ah, the fucking internet echo chamber...

thanks for checking that!

There is a critics award but it's part of International Critics' Week, which is part of Cannes but the award is decided by critics rather than the festival's own jury. So it's not as easy to find if you're looking up the Cannes festival proper. Either way it didn't actually exist until a few years after Shadows was released.

in the last nolan flock he did seem to have the ability to turn up at exactly the right place at exactly the right time with no way to explain how he knew too do so

I liked Dark Knight, but it did seem a bit exaggerated to fit into the blow shit up to the extreme ethos of post-2000 Hollywood movies. It also was a bit lengthy for a just blow shit up movie without enough of the rich character development which previously separated Batman from other comic book hero sagas. Batman was also more overtly a morality play and a self-reflective exercise. However, it looks like the Nolan Batman movies went more the direction of Batman III and Batman IV rather than Batman and Batman Returns. The last two seemed more like caricatures of the first, only Tim Burton can flirt with campy and serious in the same movie, and even he has had some epic failures at that. So the way that Batman III and Batman IV seemed like caricature versions of Tim Burton's first two Batman films, the Nolan Batmans almost seem like caricatures of a violent blockbuster action movie.

For my part, Memento is one of the single greatest mind fuck films of all time, period. Insomnia was decent, if for finally creating a good villain role for Robin Williams, and Stephen King's dry and lifeless dialogue is suited for Al Pacino. Unlike a lot of people, I really liked Inception, it wasn't Memento good, but I liked it, even went to the theater to see it, one of the few in the past ten years that has dragged me to the cinema. With the Batmans, well, I always felt the violence was a bit over the top for Batman, and the character development a little shallow, but all in all, they were beautiful produced with fantastic cinematography and balanced effects in this era of terrible CGI overkill. (remeber when 3-D almost ruined movies for the 1980s, that is how I feel about post-2000s Star Wars CGI blockbusters, its like if I wanted to play a video game I would have just done that instead of trying to watch a film)..

It is what it is. But Tim Burton's Batman and the first two Nolan flicks I think are worthy of discussion any time. Ben Affleck? Not so much. Besides, we could easily be talking about bad ass Jack Nicholson films, but demonrail keeps posting all the crap